This essay is part of a series entitled “From the Schoolhouse to the Field: Abolition Toward an Education for Liberation“.
The fact that education is reproduction is as true in Western capitalist societies as it is for indigenous practices. The difference, of course, is between Indigenous value systems, where children represent “continuity of any culture through time and through place”[1]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191., and Western value systems, in which children are optimal sites of capitalist production and reproduction, representing “the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system”.[2]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. Where value is placed in extraction and exploitation for purposes of accumulation, so too will those mechanisms and purposes be reflected in schooling.
In this essay, I discuss “Red pedagogies”, a term borrowed from Sandy Grande, and which she defines as “a consciousness and way of being in/reading the world”[3]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207. Because a comprehensive account of indigenous or native education is beyond my scope and already taken up by any number of scholars and practitioners, I will instead attempt to derive core values and common practices across a variety of indigenous groups, focusing in particular on those which have resisted — and continue to resist — settler colonial enclosures.
Learning as Lived Experience
Red pedagogy takes place everywhere, not merely in the classroom, and “in everyday, mundane contexts…not as part of a consciously designed “curriculum”.[4]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press. This can be both passive, so called learning by “osmosis”, but it also active in finding “solutions to everyday problems”[5]Klein, J. (2011). Indigenous knowledge and education–the case of the Nama people in Namibia. Education as Change, 15(1), 81-94., helping indigenous people experience “the fullness of life “.[6]Tedla, E. (1992). Indigenous African education as a means for understanding the fullness of life: Amara traditional education. Journal of Black Studies, 23(1), 7-26.
From a young age, the Amara Welloye of Ethiopia are taught fundamental skills (moyawoch) at home. Girls learn how to harvest crops and process them as food and fiber, and then cooking and spinning cloth, while boys learn farming, woodworking, tanning, weaving, and smithing.[7]Tedla, E. (1992). Indigenous African education as a means for understanding the fullness of life: Amara traditional education. Journal of Black Studies, 23(1), 7-26. Similarly, the Nama people of Namibia teach young people how to gather and process natural materials to make medicine, dyes, sunscreens, and perfumes.[8]Klein, J. (2011). Indigenous knowledge and education–the case of the Nama people in Namibia. Education as Change, 15(1), 81-94. Through ceremonies, storytelling, and apprenticeship, [Native American] children learned the life way of their parents.[9]Reyhner, J., Eder, J. (2017). American Indian Education, 2nd Edition: A History. University of Oklahoma Press. All of this is in contrast to the arbitrary skills taught in Western schools, which instead prepare young people to enter the workforce and be able to purchase their material needs from the market.
Learning as lived experience includes “interaction with other lifeforms (such as plants and animals) and interaction with the technologies of material culture”.[10]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press. It is learning “derived from communal experience, from environmental observation, from information received, and from the visions attained through ceremonies and communion with spirits of nature”.[11]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191.
Truly embodying this idea of learning as lived experience is the Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg story of Binoojiinh, as relayed by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in As We Have Always Done. In it, the character Binoojiinh (the Nishnaabeg word for child), is sent by their family to retrieve firewood from the nearby forest. Before they can complete their assigned task, Binoojiinh takes in the world around them, and through close observation and learning, they discover how to tap maple syrup. They did not hoard this new knowledge for themselves, as an advantage to be exploited for capital gains, but promptly returned to share with their family. [12]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Individuals have a responsibility to share knowledge with the group. If one person in the group fails to contribute, then the group as a whole loses, and the mana of the group may be diminished.[13]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224.
Thie story of Binoojiinh is meaningful for many reasons, particularly in how they learned a valuable life skill through the everyday experience of living and being in the world, and because of how their family responded to their discovery. That Binoojiinh did not complete their “assigned task” is of little importance compared to their monumental discovery. This story demonstrates how Red pedagogies resist enclosures of knowledge and of community — reframing which knowledges are valid, while at the same time positioning Binoojiinh as a respected knowledge creator and producer of the means of life, rather than limiting their role within the community to the Western social construct of the child.
This is not just a difference in values, but of the very purpose of education. Whereas in the Western mode, children are regarded as sites of infinite potential with respect to capital accumulation, the goal of Red pedagogies are to “nurture a new generation of elders—of land-based intellectuals—philosophers, theorists, medicine people, and historians who embodied Nishnaabeg intelligence.[14]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. The value of Binoojiinh’s discovery is not in the use or exchange value of maple syrup, whether in that moment or over the long course of production, but in what it reveals about the context of Red pedagogy, the “loving web of Nishnaabeg networks within which learning takes place”.[15]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. Binoojiinh is recognized as an agent with just as much ability to contribute to the community as any other, and with the potential to create knowledge, rather than only being a site for cultural or capitalist reproduction.
Learning as lived experience is the cultivation and construction of indigenous knowledge (IK) in the broadest sense, an umbrella beneath which all Red pedagogy can be nested. It is a rejection of the enclosures of Western schooling in that it encapsulates all aspects of indigenous life, not merely those which can be subordinated to capitalist production.
Although learning as lived experience takes place in mundane contexts, it is not itself mundane or benign, but as in the case of the MST, Red pedagogies incorporate usch things as “collective learning, small-farming, [and] agroecological production”[16]Tarlau, R. (2020). Prefigurative Politics With, In, and Against the State: The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and Latin American Philosophies of Education. Schooling in the Caribbean and Latin … Continue reading in support of an anticolonial political vision.
In the face of the ongoing projects of settler colonialism, which mediate and often altogether obstruct the relationship between indigenous people and land, the ultimate goal is community self-determination, the “development of a proud, independent, and free citizenry which relies upon itself for its own development.[17]Nyerere, J. (1968). Education for Self-Reliance. CrossCurrents, 18(4), 415-434. This, too, is captured in the story of Binoojiinh, in how they were able to derive sustenance directlly from the land, rather relying on the colonial mechanisms of the marketplace — itself dependent upon extractive relations with the natural world — or the state, which rations out material needs under the manufactured pretext of scarcity.
Learning in Community
Western education systems emphasize individual achievement and competition, and expect young people to leave their identities, cultures, families at the door, engaging under false positivistic pretexts of objectivity and standardization. This is in direct conflict with the principle of collective solidarity, which Smith regards as a core value of indigenous people.[18]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224.
Red pedagogies situate learning within sociocultural context, starting with family and “extend[ing] to the clan, to the community and tribe, and to all of the world.[19]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191. These are not the nuclear families of Western society, but the iwi (tribe) and whanau (extended family) of Maori culture. Common to all is the “human goal of creating competent, caring adults who share core values.[20]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press.
Because Indigenous nationhood occupies a continuity from past to present to future, inherent to Red pedagogies are a sense of responsibility in the present to both to ancestors and those yet to be born, in resistance to the enclosures of time and experience.[21]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
The preservation of these cultural and temporal continuities have been essential to red pedagogy since precolonial times, and have consistently re-emerged in response and in resistance to colonial enclosures. In an account of the survival schools started in Minnesota by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, Davis discusses how their “most urgent mission” was to keep families together. In practice this looked like parents, grandparents, extended family, and community members fulfilling various school functions, including teachers, aides, tutors, bus drivers, and janitors.[22]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
This was in part a matter of the organizers needing staff and lacking the funding to pay for trained teachers, but more importantly, it was inherent to the design of the survival schools, which were intentionally built “on a foundation of parental involvement and community control”. All of the adults at the survival schools, regardless of their assigned professional role, regarded themselves, and were regarded by students, as teachers. This “helped Native youth and adults discover and reconnect to their tribal heritage”.[23]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
It was also the design of survival school organizers that students cultivate close bonds, treat each other with mutual respect, and look out for each other like sisters and brothers. A typical survival school student moving through an average day might encounter a brother or sister at an all-school assembly, attend a class taught by a parent, eat a hot lunch cooked by an aunt, and ride a bus driven by an uncle.
This was instrumental to the process of “sociocultural decolonization […] through the rebuilding of traditional extended family structures (p. 225), in stark contrast to Western colonial education which “puts emphasis on competition rather than on cooperation”[24]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224., and “emphasize[s] and encourage[s] the individualistic instincts”.[25]Nyerere, J. (1968). Education for Self-Reliance. CrossCurrents, 18(4), 415-434.
In Western schools, teachers, too, are expected to leave themselves and their communities at the door, to become positivist functionaries whose primary role is to deliver content. From a bureaucratic perspective, this makes teachers fungible, capable of being replaced in some instances with educational technologies. This divests teachers of their humanity, positioning them as institutional agents — if not mere fixtures — and enclosing upon possibilities for teachers and students to form community with one another. At the survival schools, however, it was common for staff to bring their own children to class, “shaping the schools into family-oriented, multi- generational spaces”[26]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press., which undoubtedly had the effect of humanizing teachers as more than their job functions.
Where students are also fungible, as repositories of content, education within Western schools takes their personhood, their fundamental physical, social, and emotional needs for granted. On the other hand, the Te Kohanga Reo, the Maori-run community schools in New Zealand, focus on recentering and building the family[27]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224., and situate themselves as nodes within a network of support, places where children were fed even if they couldn’t afford lunch, where families received financial support during economic downturns, and where in turn parents who weren’t formally employed would contribute by fulfilling other roles at the school.
Red pedagogies counter cycles of “education-induced cultural alienation”, in which the child has been created as a discrete identity, with “school-supported cultural reinforcement“.[28]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press. For the Pueblo of the Southwestern United States, children are recognized as and made to feel as “part of a larger whole and that they have an important role to play within the context of that whole.[29]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191.
Red pedagogies embed and are embedded into the community; everyone is engaged in learning and teaching[30]Tedla, E. (1992). Indigenous African education as a means for understanding the fullness of life: Amara traditional education. Journal of Black Studies, 23(1), 7-26., whether children or adults, as with Binoojiinh learning from squirrels how to tap maple syrup, and then in turn teaching the skill to their family.[31]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. In the same way, for the Zapatistas, there are no formal teachers. Rather, “young men and women are called ‘promoters of learning’ and they organise the learning process with the children” (Esteva, 2014).
While Western education systems foster a sense of alienation for both students and teachers, for indigenous people, education is about “finding out who you are, where you come from, and your unique character”, and through that, developing a “passionate sense of self that motivates you and moves you along in life”[32]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191., expressed through one’s vocation. This is a rejection of education as a mode of production for capital accumulation — i.e. “workforce development“ — instead recognizing vocation as a true expression of self.
Red pedagogies “inculcate a sense of commitment to the total community”[33]Nyerere, J. (1968). Education for Self-Reliance. CrossCurrents, 18(4), 415-434., and encourage Indigenous people to “work for the collective good”.[34]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press. The AIM survival schools, for example, were a multigenerational project, with the original students returning after graduation to teach at the same schools, reflecting a sense of continuity, against enclosures of both time and community. The cultivation of values such as togetherness, generosity or kindness, respectfulness, obedience to elders, hospitality, and trustworthiness”[35]Tedla, E. (1992). Indigenous African education as a means for understanding the fullness of life: Amara traditional education. Journal of Black Studies, 23(1), 7-26. acts as a form of resistance to the individualism, alienation, and competition reinforced in settler schools.
In a society where people are evaluated based on their ability to accumulate capital, both children and elders are relegated to the margins, their personhoods secondary to their potential on the one hand, and “the ‘crisis of decreased labor power”[36]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. on the other. Red pedagogies refuse this enclosure of community, providing “opportunities for youth to interact with Elders and Traditional Knowledge holders on Indigenous terms”.[37]Simpson, L. R. (2004). Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge. American Indian Quarterly, 373-384.
The boundaries of what comprises “community” are flexible within Red pedagogy, extending beyond clans, tribes, and nations, to include non-indigenous people, as well as the more-than-human nations, and the rest of the natural world. This is represented in the concept of visiting, the “lateral sharing in the absence of coercion and hierarchy and in the presence of compassion”.[38]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. Simpson tells the story of Nanabush, a mythic figure representing Nishnaabeg intelligence past and present, who traveled the world to:
understand their place in it, our place in it, to create face-to-face relationships with other nations and beings because Nanabush understood that the Nishnaabeg, that we all, are linked to all of creation in a global community.[39]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Red pedagogy is the “the liminal and intellectual borderlands where indigenous and nonindigenous scholars encounter one another, aiming to “build transcultural, transnational, and intergenerational solidarities among indigenous peoples and others committed to reimagining a sovereign space free of imperialist, colonialist, and capitalist exploitation”.[40]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207
Cultural Continuity
Red pedagogies strive to maintain cultural continuity, “to transmit from one generation to the next the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the society[41]Nyerere, J. (1968). Education for Self-Reliance. CrossCurrents, 18(4), 415-434., for purposes of indigenous thriving. It is education “systematically constructed to meet the basic needs of society and the individual, which included leadership, protection, sustenance, learning, and physical well-being. Where the outcomes of Western education are measured by arbitrary metrics contrived — and mostly failing — to bear some relation to workforce potential, indigenous education is evaluated on its ability to help people and communities survive and thrive.[42]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press.
Yet thriving is only truly possible where people have sovereignty, defined as “the inherent right of a people to self-government, self-determination, and self-education”.[43]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press. For indigenous people, these rights are grounded in cultural knowledge, which include systems of governance, land-based ontologies, and life-affirming education passed on generation to generation. At the Milwaukee Community School, built at the site of a reclaimed coast guard station, teachers connected “academic subjects to Indian culture and history, creating an awareness in their students of their rich Indian heritage”.[44]Krouse, S. A. (2003). What Came Out of the Takeovers: Women’s Activism and the Indian Community School of Milwaukee. American Indian Quarterly, 27(3/4), 533-547.
As so much of cultural knowledge was lost due to the sustained impacts of settler colonialism — genocide, dispossession, assimilation — the AIM survival schools, too, were focused on the “revitalization of precolonial cultural knowledge and Indigenous identity”. When reflecting on her time at one of the survival schools, a student attributed her positive experiences to “ancestral memory”, “something inside of me that I didn’t realize was there”.[45]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
A significant part of maintaining cultural continuity is “recovering what has been suppressed“[46]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press., restoring what was lost to the abuses of colonialism — history, culture, language, identity — and indeed this recovery process is what Laenui (2000) identifies as the first stage of decolonization. The AIM survival schools were very intentional in helping students rediscover their cultural identity, revive indigenous value systems, and create “a sense of interconnectedness and belonging”.[47]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
Two essential elements in the restoration of indigenous cultural knowledge are the preservation of language[48]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.[49]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.[50]Henderson, J. S. Y. (2000). Aboriginal Thought. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 248-278.[51]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers., and the return of national territories[52]Simpson, L. R. (2004). Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge. American Indian Quarterly, 373-384. — not just a return of stolen land, but “restoring an Indigenous relationship to place”[53]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press., and ultimately the establishment of what the Maori call tino rangatimtanga, which means “absolute self-determination, full authority, and complete control”.[54]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224.
In the essay Native Assimilation, Black Subordination, and the Enclosure of Knowledge, I discussed how textbooks were weaponized to either assimilate or subordinate Black and Indigenous people. This was not just a matter of what stories were told, what historical details were excluded, or how they implicitly and explicitly reproduced and reinforced white supremacy, but a function of language itself — the colonizer’s language — in which the books were written.
As Henderson writes, “Aboriginal people cannot know who they are through the structure of alien languages…Since they do not know who they are, they remain trapped in another context and discourse that others have constructed”.[55]Henderson, J. S. Y. (2000). Aboriginal Thought. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 248-278. This is both why the speaking of Native languages was forbidden in the boarding schools, and why Red pedagogies in nearly all manifestations, have a concentrated focus on the restoration and preservation of indigenous languages.
Indigenous culture and values — transmitted with the most fidelity through indigenous languages — are inherently at odds with capitalism (i.e. extraction and exploitation), so reproduction as the educative purpose inevitably places indigenous and Western knowledge systems into conflict. Where strategies of cultural annihilation, assimilation, and forced dependency were not successful in absolute terms, indigenous people are left struggling with how to “balance the demands of a ‘busy modern life’” with the “need to connect…children to their legacy”.[56]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press.
Red pedagogies “reground students and educators in traditional knowledge and teachings”[57]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers., resisting enclosures of community and time, wherein the contributions of various knowledge creators are confined to particular eras, rendered “frivolous” in the case of the young, or ”obsolete” in the case of elders. This goes beyond book study, abstract theorizing and documentation, to material practices that “[protect] the land and the Indigenous processes for the transmission of Indigenous Knowledge to younger generations”.[58]Simpson, L. R. (2004). Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge. American Indian Quarterly, 373-384.
Environmental Knowledge
Red pedagogies are inherently place-based, facilitating a knowledge of self through “relationships with the places where we lived”.[59]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191. They are definitively land-based, because indigenous “knowledge comes from the land, and the destruction of the environment is a colonial manifestation and a direct attack on Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous nationhood.[60]Simpson, L. R. (2004). Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge. American Indian Quarterly, 373-384. I take up the distinction between place-based and land-based pedagogies is more detail in an essay on Green Pedagogies.
In Part II, I discussed the distinction between Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), the latter a subset of the former, of particular interest to conservationists as a means of preserving precious natural resources, but without consideration for — and rather open hostility toward — indigenous people.
Within Red pedagogy, so-called TEK is inexorable from IK, in the same way that indigenous people cannot be understood, or really even be defined as separate from their lands and environmental contexts. Whereas Binoojiinh was able to learn how to tap maple syrup “through the relationships…with the essential forces of nature” — the squirrel and the tree itself — Western epistemologies enclose traditional ecological knowledge outside the greater continuum of indigenous knowledge, “deterritorializ[ing] the mechanics of maple syrup production from Nishnaabeg intelligence, and from Aki [land]”.[61]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Red pedagogies reject the empirically false nature-culture divide, across which matter moves in the form of “resources” to be studied and/or extracted. Ancient African — Kemetian — civilizations “recognised that studying nature teaches one about both nature and self simultaneously”, that “all things are interrelated and interconnected”.[62]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81.
Knowledge Ecologies
The separation of “education”, by way of schooling, from culture and inherited ways of living and thriving, separates mind, body, and spirit, and unmoors us from our natural context of community and relationship to the land. Within Red pedagogies self (body, mind, spirit), community, land, and culture are all entangled, inseparable parts of a complex ecology, “inherently relational, political, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and perhaps most importantly, place based”.[63]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207
The Pueblo concept of pin geh heh, roughly translated as “split-head”, refers to a state of confusion and foolishness that comes from Native folx occupying two realities: the one in which they are true to themselves and where they come from, and the dominant reality which dishonors or disregards the same.[64]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191. There is a parallel between pin geh heh and Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness”, wherein Black people are forced to embody (at least) two separate versions of themselves in order to survive in a world dominated by white supremacy. Both pin geh heh and double consciousness speak to enclosures of body and mind, manifest in the false mind-body split.
This “splitting” takes place not only for students in Western education systems, but for teachers as well, whose labor is alienated from their identities, histories, and values. This issue is even more stark for Black, Brown, and Indigenous teachers, who “constantly have to work between two worlds”. Within indigenous education systems, “teaching is really about finding face, finding heart, finding foundation, and doing that in the context of family, of community, of relationships with a whole environment”.[65]Cajete, G. (2000). Indigenous knowledge: The Pueblo metaphor of Indigenous education. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 181-191.
Cajete goes on to compare indigenous knowledges to clouds, which “come into being, they form, and then they go out of being, and then they come into being again somewhere else.” These knowledges are never lost, are recalled when needed, and this is because they do not exist in isolation, but are rather connected across time and space, between community members, manifest in mind, body, and spirit, and are grounded in relationality with the land.
Red pedagogy is historically grounded in local and tribal narratives, intellectually informed by ancestral ways of knowing, politically centered in issues of sovereignty, and morally inspired by the deep connections among the Earth, its beings, and the spirit world.[66]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Cajete discusses how “indigenous science pursues a meandering path”, rather than following the prescriptive, “universal”, linear process of Western epistemologies, constructing knowledge through “fields of relationships and establishment of a sense of meaning, a sense of territory, a sense of breadth of the context.[67]Cajete, G. (2000b). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence (1st ed). Clear Light Publishers.
What I am calling Red pedagogy I believe is congruent with what Leanne Simpson calls Nishnaabewin, “Nishnaabeg intelligence”, or “grounded normativity”.[68]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. These relationships are dynamic and ever-changing, rather than static, as are the natural processes of our bodies and the Earth. Within this movement, Red pedagogies “create temporary harmonies through alliances and relationships among all forms and forces,” manifest in a ”web of interdependence”.[69]Henderson, J. S. Y. (2000). Aboriginal Thought. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 248-278. These ways of living, thinking, dreaming, theorizing, being are not confined to any particular time or space, but rather generate “conceptualizations of nationhood and governmentality—ones that aren’t based on enclosure, authoritarian power, and hierarchy”.[70]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
This framing is in alignment with what Engel-Di Mauro and Carroll identify as a quintessentially — i.e. indigenous — African thought system “based upon values of communalism, interconnectedness, spirituality and interrelationship, as well as centred on the interconnected nature of reality”. [71]Engel-Di Mauro, S., & Carroll, K. K. (2014). An African-centred approach to land education. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 70-81.
Such dynamism and adaptability has been necessary to counter the history of European colonial thought and culture, which is itself “an ever-changing pattern of great liberating ideas that inevitably turn into suffocating straitjackets”[72]Henderson, J. S. Y. (2000). Aboriginal Thought. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 248-278., with each new turn of the cycle of domination.
Visioning
Red pedagogies, emerging from the continuum of indigenous knowledge, necessarily incorporate aspects of dreaming, theorizing, and prefiguring — which I am grouping together under the term “visioning”. Dreaming is “where the full panorama of possibilities is expressed…which eventually become the flooring for the creation of a new social order” which can empower indigenous people to “release themselves from the shackles” of colonization.[73]Laenui, P. (2000). Processes of decolonization. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 150-160.
Because of how the word has been imposed on indigenous people, “theory”, as it manifests in the academy, or in devising ever more clever ways to mask and simultaneously reinforce colonial mechanisms, often has a poor reputation. Yet there is an understanding that it is worth identifying and drawing upon theory which can “contribute to the struggle”.[74]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224. Theory gives structure to the dream, moving it from the ephemeral to the abstract. Within Red pedagogies, theorizing is not merely an individual intellectual exercise, as it often is in Western epistemology, but “woven within kinetics, spiritual presence, and emotion”.[75]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. It is as valid as any other form of knowledge creation, “guiding human decision making over the centuries”.[76]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press.
Prefiguring concretizes the abstract through trial and iteration. Visioning is essential to the work of decolonization, and essential to the work of community and world-building even before the first settler stepped ashore. Prefiguring, as the praxis of dreaming, enables indigenous people to “experience their own aspirations for their future, and consider their own structures of government and social order to encompass and express their hopes”..[77]Laenui, P. (2000). Processes of decolonization. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 150-160. The itinerant schools, built by the Brazilian state, but governed by the MST, were an example of this kind of prefiguration, a sort of pilot for “developing communities with the capacity for self-governance and economic sovereignty”.[78]Tarlau, R. (2020). Prefigurative Politics With, In, and Against the State: The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and Latin American Philosophies of Education. Schooling in the Caribbean and Latin … Continue reading Altogether, visioning is crucial to the process of decolonization, and therefore must not be bypassed or cut short, lest it generate “short-sighted goals, generally measured by material gains”, ultimately to disastrous results..[79]Laenui, P. (2000). Processes of decolonization. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 150-160.
Visioning disrupts enclosures of time by imagining future possibilities, and also by cultvating a “hope that lives in contingency with the past—one that trusts the beliefs and understandings of our ancestors as well as the power of traditional knowledge, and the possibilities of new understandings”.[80]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207 The movement from dream to theory to prefiguration not only restores traditional lifeways, but regenerates them, what is otherwise known as resurgence — the reconfiguration of a precolonial past to create a decolonial future.
Political Action
At every historical juncture, “Native communities have persistently and courageously fought for their continued existence as peoples”, and that their very personhood was “defined politically by their government-to-government relationship with the United States”.[81]Lomawaima, K. T., & McCarty, T. L. (2006). “To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. Teachers College Press. Struggle “constantly forces [indigenous people] to identify and review what we stand for and what we stand against”.[82]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224. Red pedagogies, through their innate qualities of resistance, generate “knowledge that furthers understanding and analyses of colonization”.[83]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207 They extend “beyond the curricular and into personal and political zones of responsibility and service, to each other and to land.[84]Simpson, A. (2015). At the Crossroads of Constraint: Competing Moral Visions in Grande’s Red Pedagogy. In Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.
These analyses, grounded in deep relationship to land, informed the MST’s political strategy of occupying state-controlled lands, as well as the Zapatistas’ assertion of land sovereignty within the Lacandon jungle. For the survival schools, the very meaning of life was “derived from the cultivation of political awareness and community-mindedness”, and reflected “AIM’s vision for changing the lives and conditions of Indian people”.[85]Davis, J. L. (2013). Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities. University of Minnesota Press.
Red pedagogies reject the “politics of inclusion” inherent to liberal education and “the broader project of assimilation”. They do not presume that indigenous freedom and self-determination can be achieved through the mere representation, the inclusion of “indian components” within the same processes of extraction and exploitation central to the settler colonial project[86]Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.. Instead, Red pedagogies evaluate the “political, social, economic, and judicial structures themselves”..[87]Laenui, P. (2000). Processes of decolonization. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 150-160.
The superficial concessions of the state “reinforce settler colonialism, because [they do not] stop the system that causes the harm in the first place” and maintain a “constant state of crisis”.[88]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. These recursive cycles of domination follow stages of oppression, resistance, reconciliation, backlash and capitulation, which leads to the next round of oppression. Assuming, of course, that any resistance isn’t immediately stamped out by state violence.
The empty rhetoric and hollow gestures of the liberal state around such things as “equity”, “diversity”, or “inclusion”, purport to allow Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to participate within the larger society and economy, but do not challenge the “hegemonic frames of the nation-state”[89]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press., which are built upon structures and relations of domination.
in response to the student movements of the 1970s and 1980s for ethnic studies and Native American self-determination, the U.S. educational system responded with inclusive pedagogies for minoritization and neoliberal multiculturalism.[90]Goldstein, A. (2015). Colonialism Undone: Pedagogies of Entanglement. In Grande, S. (2015). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
These efforts are more than happy to co-opt the images and voices of those indigenous people who build careers bemoaning their status as victims..[91]Laenui, P. (2000). Processes of decolonization. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 150-160. Simpson notes how “Indigenous grief can be managed, exploited, and used by the state to placate Indigenous resistance”.[92]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press. And as Smith argues, indigenous people “need to engage in deeper societal change at the level of structures”, rather than “simply changing people’s behaviour and attitudes”.[93]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224.
Social change does not occur merely through “activists making demands on the state and state actors conceding to those demands”.[94]Tarlau, R. (2020). Prefigurative Politics With, In, and Against the State: The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and Latin American Philosophies of Education. Schooling in the Caribbean and Latin … Continue reading It comes from indigenous people “[setting] the agenda for change themselves”[95]Smith, G. H. (2000). Protecting and respecting Indigenous knowledge. Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision, 209-224., “building movements that embody the Indigenous alternative in structure, process, and formation”[96]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press., in order to move toward sovereignty and self-determination.
For the MST, this looks like occupying land — recognizing its centrality in indigenous sovereignty — pressuring the Brazilian government to release those lands to occupying families and build schools on site, where they in turn teach children “how to critique, subvert, and practice alternatives to capitalism”.[97]Tarlau, R. (2020). Prefigurative Politics With, In, and Against the State: The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and Latin American Philosophies of Education. Schooling in the Caribbean and Latin … Continue reading Julius Nyerere, in his consideration of education for self-reliance in Tanzania, aimed to “create a socialist society based on three principles: equality and respect for human dignity; sharing of the resources which are produced by our efforts; work by everyone and exploitation by none”.[98]Nyerere, J. (1968). Education for Self-Reliance. CrossCurrents, 18(4), 415-434. In these ways, Red pedagogies are expressly political: “anticapitalist and decolonialist but also profoundly spiritual”.[99]Grande, S. (2010). Chapter 21: Red Pedagogy. Counterpoints, 356, 199-207
Within Red pedagogies there is no separation between education and activism, because if education is to reproduce the means of life, the ways of thriving in right relationship to people and land, it must contend with the forces and relations — settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism — which deny those very possibilities.
Resistance, Regeneration, Resurgence
Red pedagogies form an overlapping matrix of theory and praxis, an ecology of knowledge within which indigenous people resist forces of extraction and exploitation, continuously regenerate themselves during and in the aftermath of trauma, and build resilience to sustain their collective lifeways and the landbases upon which they are situated. Through lived experience Red pedagogies resist enclosures of learning and labor, cultivating the skills, knowledges, and relationships necessary for survival. They reject enclosures of community where they explicitly situate learning within the clan or tribe, where they honor and respect young people as knowledge creators, and where they “visit” with other nations, including animals and plants.
Red pedagogies, being grounded in place, and land-based, overthrow enclosures of space; traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is inexorable from the broader context of Indigenous knowledge (IK), or what Simpson calls grounded normativity, “a series of complex, interconnected cycling processes that make up a nonlinear, overlapping emergent and responsive network of relationships of deep reciprocity, intimate and global interconnection and interdependence, that spirals across time and space.[100]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.
Red pedagogies defy enclosures of time and experience through intergenerational learning — the lateral sharing of knowledge with love and consent, as opposed to the coercive, top-down, one-way, hierarchical relations of the school. This learning flows along a continuum from past to present, and projects into the future by way of visioning, which encompasses dreaming, theory, and prefiguration.
Indigeneity is often defined in diametric opposition to the settler. And while it is true that Red pedagogies are expressly political in their refusal the enclosures of settler colonialism, they also create, support, and affirm indigenous life, both at present, and “as they have always done”.[101]Simpson, L. B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. United States: University of Minnesota Press.